The Chelsea Murders Read Free Page B

the area. He didn’t seem to have recalled her yet, which was something.
    ‘I’m not supposed to let anyone in, you see,’ he said.
    ‘Not even us ?’ Mooney said, incredulously.
    Logan was suddenly standing there. She remembered him when she saw him, big beery belly, potato face. ‘Oh, Gerry!’
    ‘Yeah. Jesus,’ he said. ‘Who is it?’
    ‘What can I say to you?’ Mooney said, solemnly pushing him inside. ‘The shock of it!’
    ‘Yeah,’ Logan said again. He was watching with bemusement as she closed the door in the constable’s face. ‘I don’t know what the hell is happening,’ he said.
    ‘Of course you don’t, poor man,’ Mooney told him. ‘You can carry on now,’ she said to the help.
    Mooney didn’t know how all this commanding stuff was coming out of her. It rose unbidden at moments of creation, such as the dawn of a truly shit-hot story. There was one here. She had absolutely no doubt about it. Fuzz at the door – for a common drowning? Not likely. Something was going on. Better still, it was just one piece of fuzz, unconfident of instructions, not totally in possession of his marbles. Surely a rapid drafting from an undermanned local station? He was holding the fort till the C.I.D. men arrived. They hadn’t arrived yet. She was in at the dawn.
    ‘Let’s go to her room,’ she said, realizing the mileage that had to be crammed into a few minutes. She was on tenterhooks for the sound of a siren.
    ‘Her room?’ Logan said.
    ‘Germaine.’
    ‘Germaine’s room?’
    ‘Poor man, you’re all done in,’ Mooney said, suppressing an urge to do him in. His hair was dishevelled, wits all away. This was the way they had to be kept. ‘You lead the way,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to contact her dear parents.’
    ‘Germaine’s parents? What parents?’ Logan said.
    ‘The rest of her poor family,’ she amended. No parents. Or the girl was a liar. What was a part-timer doing living on the premises, anyway? The place smelt terrible, unaired, and only half an hour to opening time. Where was the landlady? Something was amiss here, the story improving by the moment. Theywere standing in a dark beery little porch, one passage leading to the cavernous bar, another to inner regions. She turned there. ‘I think I remember it,’ she said.
    ‘No, let me,’ Logan said. ‘What was that name – Mooney?’
    ‘Mooney. Mary ,’ she gently reproved.
    ‘Sorry, Mary. This is a hell of a thing. Are you a relation, then?’
    ‘Not a relation ,’ Mooney said, again reprovingly. ‘I’ll have to tell her relations … So full of life. What happened?’
    ‘I don’t know what happened.’ Logan’s enormous backside, flapping shiny cloth, sagged ahead of her up the steep stairs. ‘She said she didn’t feel well. She came up here about nine o’clock. We had a full house.’
    ‘You gave her a knock.’
    ‘I gave her a knock,’ Logan agreed. ‘I don’t know when, maybe half-past, and she said she’d come down, but she never.’
    No landlady, then; and he hadn’t sent anyone else up to give her a knock. Logan was in the way of giving her knocks. All good.
    ‘And later she wasn’t there?’ Mooney said.
    ‘That’s right,’ Logan said, and looked round at her with his mouth open. ‘Were you here, then?’ he said.
    Mooney sorrowfully shook her head, and solicitously prodded his rear upwards. She had an acute mental image of police cars coming down the King’s Road at this very minute; also of assemblies of taxis en route from Fleet Street, occupants’ eyes fixed on the meters.
    It wasn’t on the first landing. Germaine’s room was an attic. A frowsty one, too; the deceased, on the immediate evidence, a first-class slut. There was a heavy female smell in the curtained room. The bed had been slept in and hastily made up again, covers thrown over. A few shoes were kicked under a small padded chair, on which was a tangle of tights and of grotty, by no means spotless, knickers; Germaine not a